the mountain goats

044. Stars Fell on Alabama

Alex Russell Nine Black Poppies , , , , , , ,

John Darnielle rewrites a traditional love song in the style of the Mountain Goats with “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

Track: “Stars Fell on Alabama”
Album: Nine Black Poppies (1995)

The original “Stars Fell on Alabama” is very sweet, and I highly suggest the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong version before trying to approach this one. The terminology will get stretched here if we call the song by the Mountain Goats a “cover” because it appears to share little beyond a title. It’s that fact that says everything, since you have to consider why John Darnielle borrowed the title of such a sweet song to write a song that ends with someone pulling a gun on someone they love.

Darnielle says he wrote the anti-love anthem “No Children” when he heard the Lee Ann Womack song “I Hope You Dance” on the radio. I won’t link it here, but it’s so super-saturated that it’s difficult to listen to even once. What does “promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance” in a love song even mean, really? Darnielle’s catalog is designed for someone who hears that and doesn’t hear their world. “No Children” isn’t a love song for a new generation or anything, but it’s meant to sound familiar. You know “I hope you die // I hope we both die,” whether you want to or not.

The comparison here isn’t as stark, because the sweetness of the original “Stars Fell on Alabama” is far more genuine than “I Hope You Dance.” While this one isn’t an attempt to “fix” a message, it’s still a rewriting of a love song. In both songs two lovers spend time alone together, but in the Goats version it’s not “I never planned in my imagination a situation so heavenly // a fairy land where no one else could enter” it’s “and your pistol glistened.”

043. Pure Intentions

Alex Russell Bitter Melon Farm, Songs for Petronius , , , , , , , ,

“Pure Intentions” may sound a little dated, but it offers two fascinating minutes of the early Mountain Goats style. 

Track: “Pure Intentions”
Album: Songs for Petronius (1992) and Bitter Melon Farm (1999)

“The sound of the singing on it makes me cringe, but I am aware of a few people who think this is as close to perfection as I’ve come.” – John Darnielle, talking about Songs for Petronius on the liner notes of the compilation Bitter Melon Farm.

Peter Hughes, the bassist for the Mountain Goats, was recently asked in an interview about fans who prefer the early boombox stuff to the modern version of the band. He spoke of those fans the same way John Darnielle usually does. They both essentially said that they understand why people love the torn-down, robotic weirdness of the early singles and cassettes. The band has been around since 1991, and it’s certainly true that there’s been an “evolution” from the early tracks to what the band is now. Whether you think the recent albums are better or worse is a matter of debate, but I tend to agree with Peter Hughes when he says “If John had continued to make a boombox-recorded version of each record alongside the full studio album, which one would you spend more time with? For me, I wouldn’t listen to the boombox one.”

“Pure Intentions” is pure early Goats. It’s a little hard to listen to from a sound quality perspective, but it wasn’t really intended to be judged against Tallahassee. For the most part, all five songs on Songs for Petronius work more as history lessons than they do as things to sit down and listen to in 2015. It’s interesting to hear Darnielle’s early songwriting. “You’re so pretty // I could burst // and I wonder // who’s gonna talk first” wouldn’t be totally out of place on a later album, and it certainly does plant that seed of “what are these two people up to?”

042. Color in Your Cheeks

Alex Russell All Hail West Texas , , , , , , ,

“Color in Your Cheeks” examines that quiet moment where everyone in the room knows they aren’t supposed to say anything.

Track: “Color in Your Cheeks”
Album: All Hail West Texas (2002)

All Hail West Texas got a re-issue recently, so hopefully the people who love the “polished” stuff are now getting a chance to hear the “low-fi” stuff. Even though it’s the last of the boombox albums, All Hail West Texas has enough cred that it’s tough to imagine any Goats fan hasn’t heard it. It’s a delightfully quiet album, with songs like “Pink and Blue” and “Distant Stations” representing the peak of “difficult subject matter/quiet recording” mastery.

“Color in Your Cheeks” is a great starter song for the album. It’s the third track, but the opener is the fiery, furious “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and the second track “Fall of the Star High School Running Back” is a wonderful parable, but not necessarily the greatest indicator of what’s going on in All Hail. “Color in Your Cheeks” hammers home the idea of being lonely in a crowd. Each verse represents a different person coming to a home-away-from-home in the hopes that they’ll be able to get some solace.

Later in the album you have “The Mess Inside” and “Riches and Wonders” and you know you’re in a real Goats album. You’re dealing with two people who are in love but having a really, really damn hard time of it. “Color in Your Cheeks” is somewhat of a rare message for the band. Even though there are seven specific places listed (eight if you count “across the street”), it’s not about specifics at all. When they play the song live, John Darnielle sometimes randomizes the list or includes other locales. Soviet Georgia or no, when you’ve come from a long way, a drink and some people to be quiet with can be all the gift you need.

041. Tallahassee

Alex Russell Tallahassee , , , , , , ,

The title track on Tallahassee opens the album with a mournful look at a love that won’t save two people.

Track: “Tallahassee”
Album: Tallahassee (2002)

“In the case of “Tallahassee” it seemed like a scene-setting song: it introduced the principal characters, established that there’s been a movement from the other side of the country to here, and took one last look in the rear view at the thing they once had that’s now in collapse.” – John Darnielle, on why the title track is first on Tallahassee.

The only part of Tallahassee that doesn’t happen in Florida happens in Nevada. The Alpha Couple (the common term for the couple on the album) is leaving their home and headed to the place where what’s already fallen apart will finally become impossible to deny. By verse three, the couple admits “there is no deadline // there is no schedule // there is no plan we can fall back on,” but we know they’re wrong about the next line: “the road this far can’t be retraced.” It can be retraced through dozens of other Alpha Couple songs, but they aren’t ready to do that. Not yet.

There is an inevitability to the sadness in both of them. Most Alpha Couple songs are bathed in descriptions of a dark future, so they never really seem to doubt how it will all end. That said, there’s more tied up in why these are “love songs” in “Tallahassee” than so many other places. The verse-ending “And you // you” is delivered with as much love as John Darnielle can muster. Even though you know how the story will end — it’s never a good sign when you say “prayers to summon the destroying angel” on the way to your new home — you have to understand the love these people once shared. It’s easy to see Tallahassee as an angry record, but its title track acts as a dirge for the best parts of The Alpha Couple.

040. Gojam Province 1968

Alex Russell Satanic Messiah , , , , , , , , ,

In the history of “Gojam Province 1968” people solve one problem only to find they can only do so much.

Track: “Gojam Province 1968”
Album: Satanic Messiah (2008)

Satanic Messiah is a four-song EP that contains a song called “Wizard Buys a Hat.” When he introduces the song live, John Darnielle sometimes mentions that he felt uniquely compelled to come up with something worthy of that title. It’s a great joke, but it doesn’t really prepare you for the rest of the EP. The albums are mostly thematic, but I haven’t found that the EPs follow anything like that. One of my favorites, Babylon Springs, has one song about a wrestler getting his righteous revenge on a world that has no use for him (“Ox Baker Triumphant”) and another about the sweetness of the “good” parts of infidelity (“Alibi”). The result is a bunch of great songs, but a puzzler when looking for a thread.

When you have a song like “Gojam Province 1968” you need no theme. It doesn’t go with “Wizard Buys a Hat” but it doesn’t really need to go with anything. In 1968, and, yes, in Gojam, the populace rose up against excessive taxes they were unable to afford. The government heard their pleas and met the resistance with reform. It’s a small victory in history, but a very big one for people who were “bashing in the heads of tax collectors.”

John Darnielle sings it softly and lightly plays a beautiful piano tune. For the last few years the band has been adding more and more quiet piano, which can sometimes feel at odds with the original one-man-stomping-and-destroying-a-guitar John Darnielle that many fans love. The best of the piano songs wouldn’t work any other way, though, and “Gojam Province 1968” needs to be this delicate. The end of the song leaves you with a “where do we go from here” feeling, and that’s the real point of this pretty song about ugliness.

039. Minnesota

Alex Russell Full Force Galesburg , , , , , , , , , ,

Two oddly romantic images in “Minnesota” briefly obscure a tale about how we can forget how to love each other.

Track: “Minnesota”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

“A little angrier and a little less easy to sympathize with.” – John Darnielle, comparing the couple in Full Force Galesburg to people on other Mountain Goats albums.

For an album that ends with a repetition of “it’s all coming apart again,” there’s a lot of sweet-sounding stuff on Full Force Galesburg. It’s a tough album to break down in a lot of respects. John Darnielle mostly describes it as an album about two desperate people who aren’t in a healthy relationship with each other anymore, but that can very loosely be layered onto many, many Goats albums. These two specifically are going through something else.

“Minnesota” stretches the definition of “love song.” One character surrounds their house with Dutch seeds while the other sings an old song. While those are nice images, they are surrounded by suggestions of something very grisly. Both verses talk about an unrelenting heat, and in the heat our guide through this romance is drinking and staring at his wife. He’s only drinking and staring at her.

If you are given to hope, it may be difficult to pull out the darkness in a song that’s this sweet on the surface. Full Force Galesburg has much angrier guitar on it elsewhere and the lyrics of “Chinese House Flowers” speak much more directly to the end of love (“I want you the way you were”), but “Minnesota” is just as grim about the chances of these two working out. These two are sharing some strangely intimate moments, but they aren’t really communicating. This is not The Alpha Couple, but it’s certainly people who could appreciate their method of “dealing” with problems.

038. Estate Sale Sign

Alex Russell All Eternals Deck , , , , , , ,

After unexplained events, two people have to sell off the stuff of their life in “Estate Sale Sign.”

Track: “Estate Sale Sign”
Album: All Eternals Deck (2011)

The conceit of All Eternals Deck is that it’s a collection of lost, original tarot cards that has been presented now as an album with each song representing a card. You don’t need to think too hard about that, but it does say a lot about the kind of guy John Darnielle is. It’s a loose idea for an album that infuses a little weirdness and mysticism into even straightforward songs.

“Estate Sale Sign” is about a couple that has to get rid of most of their possessions in an estate sale, but it’s also about the general sense of melancholy associated with losing the trappings of your life. These two people don’t necessarily know how they feel about this sale or how they feel about the things in it. The narrator calls various items “crude little wooden idols,” “trinkets,” “treasures,” and “unloved icons.” The broad sense is something we can all understand, because we’ve all had to get rid of things and we’ve all felt the emotional loss connected to physical loss.

The specific, however, is what makes this a Mountain Goats song. “Stock shots, stupid stock shots from the Pomona mall // set up like unloved icons gathering dust up on the wall” tells you exactly what you need to know about the kind of things they’re selling. When the narrator throws in that the stock footage they’re trying to sell is from “films no one remembers” but that they remember “when their names were dear to you and me” we learn about the couple’s relationship.

Popular culture has given us many versions of couples dividing up their stuff after a breakup, but in the world of the Mountain Goats, when something goes badly in your love life you need to sell everything you own in dramatic, infuriating fashion.

037. Alpha Incipiens

Alex Russell Zopilote Machine , , , , , , , , ,

The first song about The Alpha Couple shows that the iconic lovers weren’t ever all that great for each other.

Track: “Alpha Incipiens”
Album: Zopilote Machine (1994)

Every song about The Alpha Couple is fascinating. The timeline is fun to try to figure out, but you can’t do it for certain. You can figure out that some have to happen before others based on geography — they start on the west coast and end in Florida — but beyond that it’s all conjecture. In that way The Alpha Couple is less a story to be uncovered and labelled and more the ultimate idea of two people crashing and burning when combined.

When you listen to the spite on “Oceanographer’s Choice” you feel like the hate is so bitter and so real that the love must have been some serious business. Anyone who learns to hate that hard has to have loved even harder, right? Well, the timeline may be up for debate, but The Alpha Series has a definite start and a definite end. Their final song (chronologically) is “Alpha Omega,” and by then they’re down to just one of them. Their first song is “Alpha Incipiens” from Zopilote Machine, and that’s been confirmed. That much, John Darnielle says, he’ll give you.

Are they in love in “Alpha Incipiens?” The fast-paced, screaming song tells the drunken tale of one of them trying to understand the other as the drinks begin to flow. They will get drunk and they will get desperate as their story unfolds, but it starts with simple, ice-cold vodka and “the only thing I know is that I love you // and I’m holding on.”

It really foretells Tallahassee and the oncoming trainwreck very well. Even on one of their first mornings — and in their first tale — the couple gets drunk and has trouble talking to each other. Communication will become the least of their problems.

036. The Young Thousands

Alex Russell We Shall All Be Healed , , , , , , ,

On an album full of the “after” of drugs, “The Young Thousands” looks at the “before” right after the point of no return.

Track: “The Young Thousands”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

“I have this sick feeling there’s something really great past the point of no return.” – the liner notes of We Shall All Be Healed

We Shall All Be Healed may be all about one thing, but it doesn’t have one just one way of talking about it. Songs like “Mole and “All Up the Seething Coast” are entirely low points. “Quito” and “Palmcorder Yajna” are less low, though in the grand scene of addiction terms like “low” really become complex.

“The Young Thousands” is without mood, because it is about inevitability. You live in a nightmarish building, haunted by your friends who are hardly your friends, and you are consumed like the others like you. You don’t feel good or bad about your choices. You don’t think of previous or post. You exist in this moment, you and the other young thousands.

Looked at specifically among the other tracks on We Shall All Be Healed, “The Young Thousands” hints hardest at some of the darker choices. “The things that you’ve got coming will do things that you’re afraid to,” John Darnielle insists, and it drives home the album’s message that it doesn’t really matter what you’re interested in doing or not doing when you’re hooked. “Mole” may be the result of decisions made in the depths of addiction, but “The Young Thousands” is the defense that those aren’t even “decisions.” When he talks about addiction and his youth, John Darnielle always speaks very sadly of some of the choices he made. The narrator in “The Young Thousands” wouldn’t even understand that that is a place you can even end up.

035. Crows

Alex Russell Devil in the Shortwave , , , , , , ,

 

John Darnielle strains his voice in a graveyard in “Crows,” but he also asks us to consider what the scene means to us.

Track: “Crows”
Album: Devil in the Shortwave (2002)

Devil in the Shortwave clocks in at twelve minutes long. Over two-and-a-half decades and likely a thousand songs, it’s very easy to lose track of twelve minutes. “Yoga” and “Genesis 19:1-2” still get a little play live now and they’re both excellent representations of the group’s earlier style. “Dirty Old Town” is a cover and “Comandante” is one of the all-time screamers; it’ll never fall all the way out of any fan’s rotation. Any song that starts with “I’m gonna drink more whiskey than Brendan Behan!” will always have a place in a certain mood.

That leaves the fifth song: “Crows.” Our narrator visits their great-grandmother’s grave in North Carolina only to find that a construction crew is destroying the headstones to raze the site for “graduate-student housing.” The specificity there is wonderful. Whatever you think of higher learning and its purpose, the idea of turning over a site of what may be century-old graves for dorms for twenty-somethings is striking.

For a group so obsessed with location, it’s interesting that “Crows” considers if the central location in the song really matters or not. The narrator says they “stood by a nameless hole in the ground” and that “maybe it was the right grave // maybe not.” We put our own feelings on those statements and realize how sad this tableau is, but our narrator doesn’t actually say it. They may be transcending the experience and considering that whether or not they can find her exact grave or not, they’ve still got this feeling. John Darnielle speeds through the song and while the delivery conveys a real sadness, it’s open-ended enough that you can draw your own conclusion about what the narrator finds in themselves.